Litigating at the Intersection of Cooperation and Sedona Principle 6

The terms “cooperation” and “transparency” continue to gain traction in the context of litigation discovery, and the emergence of these concepts has been accompanied by a gradual erosion of a party’s ability to respond to discovery with autonomy. Litigants are often forced to make a decision as the expectation of cooperation in discovery intersects with the understanding that it is the responding party who will be in the best position to formulate a comprehensive discovery plan to search for, gather, and ultimately produce its own electronically stored information (ESI). This is based on the premise that the responding party is best situated to understand its own systems, the formats of communication used by employees, and the lingo used to discuss the subject matter of the dispute.

The Sedona Conference Principle 6 recognizes that a responding party is in the best position to select relevant technology to appropriately gather and produce relevant information. On the other hand, the Sedona Conference Cooperation Proclamation, the 2016 Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and countless judicial decisions extoll the benefits of cooperation. The intersection of Sedona Conference Principle 6 with the concepts of “cooperation” and “transparency” has been on full display in several recent decisions involving attempts by a requesting party to force a responding party to utilize technology-assisted review (TAR). These decisions signify courts’ expanding acknowledgment of TAR as an e-discovery tool and its impact in the context of parties’ obligations under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26.

The full article, published in today’s issue of The Legal Intelligencer, can be found here.